Gabriela Volanti

Gabriela Volanti (* 1969 in Augsburg ) is a German painter and graphic artist of Sicilian descent. She has lived and worked in Berlin since 2000.

life and work

Volanti studied design at the Augsburg University of Applied Sciences between 1986 and 1991 and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1994 to 1999 . She spent 1999 and 2000 in Paris on a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service . In 2007, Volanti received a working grant for the Czech Republic as part of the European cultural exchange .

In 2002 Gabriela Volanti began sewing her mostly monochrome oil paintings. As part of this process, Volanti first gathered up the canvas and sewed the fold that formed backwards with a sewing machine, so that the folded part of the picture disappeared on the surface of the picture and the visible parts of the painting moved together. The seams formed their own picture elements. Similar to a collage , different picture and text elements were put together without different picture templates being combined. Since 2010 the artist has also used this technique - sometimes in combination with the classic collage technique - on works on paper and especially on works that take newspaper pages as their starting point. This resulted in three different groups of works: On the one hand, gathering, even sewing, on the other hand fans and finally with zigzag seams completely over-sewn, text-covering works. Larger works abstract more from the medium of the newspaper. In the case of smaller works, on the other hand, the relationship between the newspaper's image and text was retained as a starting point. The graphic work Volantis was based on her painterly work and developed individual aspects further. Andreas Platthaus referred to the destructive nature of Volanti's sewing technique, especially in relation to working with newsprint, which, however, should not be understood as destructive. Volanti is represented in the Hegenbarth Collection Berlin , among others .

Exhibitions (selection)

• 1996–1998: Large art exhibition in Munich , Haus der Kunst , Munich
• 1997: Wittenbrink Gallery, Munich
• 1999: Contemporary Art from Bavaria , ZDF , Mainz
• 1999: National of Drawing , Augsburg
• 2000: Solo exhibition, Wittenbrink Gallery, Munich
• 2003: Palazzo Barberini, Palestrina / Rome
• 2004: AKH Gallery, Vienna
• 2005: Solo exhibition, Max Planck Society , Munich
• 2005: Solo exhibition, Galerie Herschel, Berlin
• 2007: Scholarship exhibition , Klenova / Freising
• 2008: Solo exhibition, Galerie Sandra Bürgel, Berlin
• 2009: Solo exhibition The world as an adversary of the good , 18m gallery, Berlin
• 2009: feedback 1989 , Tirana
• 2009: forgotten bar, Berlin
• 2010: 18m gallery, Berlin
• 2011: 18m gallery, Berlin, together with Quirin Bäumler
• 2012: Solo exhibition, Gellertgut, Christoph Merian Foundation , Basel
• 2014: Galerie Claudia Delank, Berlin
• 2014: Galerie Semjon Contemporary, Berlin
• 2014: Galerie Pilscheuer, Basel
• 2016: Big cinema , Kino International , Berlin
• 2017: PROLOG , Hegenbarth Collection Berlin
• 2018: Art Collection Krohne / Kunstverein Duisburg

literature

• German Embassy, ​​Tirana (ed.), Feedback 1989 , Tirana 2009.
• Galerie Claudia Delank (Ed.), East is East and West is West. Insect pictures by Milena Aguilar, Maria Sibylla Merian, Kitagawa Utamaro, Gabriela Volanti. With an essay by Horst Bredekamp , Berlin 2014.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Davide Ferri, Contemporary Insect Pictures between Nature Observation and Transformation. Milena Aguilar and Gabriela Volanti. in: Galerie Claudia Delank (Ed.), East is East and West is West. Insect pictures by Milena Aguilar, Maria Sibylla Merian, Kitagawa Utamaro, Gabriela Volanti. With an essay by Horst Bredekamp. Berlin 2014, pp. 33–35, here pp. 34–35.
2. ↑ Andreas Platthaus , And sewn up! Volanti in Berlin. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . October 17, 2009, ( accessed from faz.net June 6, 2019).
3. ↑ Volantis short biography on Galerie Stephanie Kelly website, accessed on April 26, 2019.